NEW YORK (AP) — Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, is used to strangers expressing sympathy when they learn what she does for a living.
"It's all so funny," she says. "When I tell them I run the trade association for independent stores, they'll say, 'It's just so sad that they're disappearing.' I don't think they're really keeping track, or they just know about a store that closed or heard about one closing."
The decline of physical bookstores remains so embedded in popular culture that the man dating Anne Hathaway's character in " The Devil Wears Prada 2 " laments that bookstores are "getting downsized and consolidated." But the decline actually ended years ago, and the latest numbers from the American Booksellers Association show independent stores expanding at a pace not seen this century.
